by Joan Lock
Given the numbers and the rapid state of decay there was scarcely any time left for identification which, in any case, was becoming increasingly impossible. At that day’s inquest the coroner had quickly signed burial orders for the seventy-three unidentified interred that same afternoon. And, despite the increased numbers, the police still had to search them, remove any jewellery and clothing, note their descriptions and take their photographs.
The Standard, which had at first severely criticized the police, now, in their intemperate fashion, went to the other extreme, saying that no words of praise for them could be too high. It would never be forgotten, they said:
… that in a time unparalleled in English history they performed a public service, the record of which should be handed down as one of the brightest spots in the annals of the nineteenth century. Many men who have been rewarded with decorations and titles have never gone through a particle of the terrible work that has been undertaken so cheerfully and carried out so admirably, by Sergeant Alstin and Inspectors Lucas, Meering, Phillips and Dawkins of the River and Metropolitan Police … never shrinking from what has appalled some of the most callous and hardened of the riverside men who have officiated as labourers for a portion only of that time.4
The Times agreed that the behaviour and the industry ‘of the greater number of police was beyond all praise’.5
Mr Carttar opened his inquest at 10 a.m. on the Monday with more condolences sent by the Queen from Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park, the site of her mausoleum to the late Prince Albert. This was another proof, among many, said the coroner, that the sorrows and distresses of the relatives of the deceased were mourned over by Her Most Gracious Majesty, and it showed how affectionately Her Majesty seeked to share, to solace and to alleviate the grief of her people.
Not sufficiently, of course, for her to come out of her seclusion to actually visit them. But there had been an attempt to attract royalty to the scene. J. Orrell Lever, the founder of the London Steamboat Company, wrote to the Prince of Wales offering to place the saloon steamer Victoria at his disposal should he desire to visit the scene of the accident now that the wreck was raised. If the Prince had any such inclination it would doubtless have been quelled by Lever’s comment that by doing so the Prince might then see that Captain Grinstead was entirely free from blame. The Prince’s private secretary replied thanking him for the offer but saying that His Royal Highness regretted that ‘it was not in his power to take advantage of your proposal’.6
Back at the Woolwich inquest Mr Carttar said that now the dimensions of the disaster was becoming fully known he had one or two observations to make on the subject:
At the outset it was my wish and intention to have taken evidence of the identity of only a limited number of bodies, feeling that the ends of justice might be duly and properly attained by such a course. But when I found no less than fifty-three bodies awaiting the inspection of the jury the first day, I staggered under the magnitude of the task before me. My brother coroner (Mr Lewis), of Essex, had the same impression as myself, that possibly the viewing of a few bodies might be sufficient and he was kind enough to ask from the proper authorities some advice as to the course we ought both to pursue.
That advice unfortunately could not be given us, and we were of necessity thrown back on what may be termed the state of the law, which requires that on the body of every person who has come by a violent death an inquest should be held. It was felt, moreover, by the relatives of the deceased and others that the dead should be identified as far as possible in order to prevent an unseemly scramble for property on the part of people who might have no right to it whatever – that is to say people who might claim bodies with property, knowing that they could have them buried free of expense by the parish authorities.
I have, therefore, come to the conclusion that we ought to pursue our painful and arduous task of identification to the end if such a course should meet with your approval. It will not only have the advantage I have mentioned but it will be some consolation to the relatives and will tend to prevent fraud hereafter. Of course, those beyond recognition we can only put aside as unknown. Their clothes will be sacredly preserved as a last clue possible to their identity. Do you approve gentlemen to the course I propose?7
Again, the jury did, which was a great relief to the coroner’s mind. He clearly would have been even more relieved if members of the public would stop sending him letters containing silly and impractical suggestions. They were overwhelming him and wasting his time.
And so began another very long day listening to unbearably sad tales from unbearably sad people who stood in the midst of the semi-circle formed by their boardroom table, in the centre of which, the back-lit figure of the kindly, white-haired coroner, was framed by the large windows behind him.
Some names must now have been familiar to them. The bodies of Mrs Briscoe and her 5-year-old daughter Sarah had finally been found, as well as more children of the Leaver, Childs and Towse families, plus various Bible party members. Mr Henry Drew from Tottenham identified the last two of his three little daughters, telling the court that his wife had died from shock to the system and a broken heart at losing her children. William Quinton recognized Thomas Davies, his master’s son. Of the Davies family of six there was now only one missing, he told the coroner, a 15-year-old boy.
The captain of the Princess Alice, William Robert Hartridge Grinstead, was formally identified, as was his 65-year-old brother, Charles Thomas, who, it was said, had rendered very active assistance at the Sittingbourne railway accident the previous Saturday. He and his wife had been staying at Sittingbourne with his sister, but they had left to join his brother’s boat at Sheerness.
New stories emerged. Mr John Baker came up from Somerset to identify his son, John, and John’s wife, Emma Jane, ‘only married Tuesday week’. William John Richards identified his fiancé, 28-year-old Minette Bishop, adding ‘we should have been married in a few weeks’.8 John Charles Weaver, a 64-year-old musician onboard the Albert Edward pleasure steamer, came to identify his wife, Jane. He had had free passes for the Princess Alice for Jane and her friend, he said, but they went without waiting for him and paid their fares. ‘I missed going with them.’9
The increasing problems with physical recognition and clothing discolouration led to more reliance on other means of distinguishing people. With Ellen Ridout, a 27-year-old milliner, it was her penchant for trinkets, ‘which we all knew’, said her brother Henry when identifying her, while with publican George Hughes of the Control Arms, Porters’ Green, it was the wart on his nose.10 Hugh Burns, over whose body there had been something of a dispute, was finally successfully claimed by his brother-in-law Joseph Sykes, who recognized Hugh’s clothes, boots and the season pass for the local railway found in his pocket.
By the time the jury finally retired at 10.15 p.m., after a twelve-hour sitting, the Woolwich coroner had issued 123 burial certificates and the coroners at Blackwall and Poplar had added several more. Keeping an accurate account of the current total number of dead was difficult, however, particularly now that, commented The Times, ‘they drift into strange nooks above and beyond the site of the catastrophe. Yesterday two were reported at Westminster, five at Blackwall, four at the Victoria Docks’.11 However, it was clearly around 600, so there was no longer any hiding the size of the tragedy.
The following day, the status of the Princess Alice disaster as the country’s dominant drama was challenged by news from the Welsh coalmines. Mining accidents, like those of the railways, were quite frequent occurrences. Already that year there had been a mining explosion at the Wood Pit near Wigan in Lancashire that had cost the lives of around 200 men and boys. Now it was the turn of the Prince of Wales Colliery at Abercarn in Monmouthshire: 370 men and boys had been working underground when massive explosions ripped through the mine. Eighty were rescued quite quickly and another ten (badly burned) a little later, but such were the fires raging through the 3 miles of tunnels that the rescue
teams were soon ordered to withdraw. A number of those rescued died soon after of shock, after-damp and burns. The total loss of life turned out to be 262, the fires took two months to quell and the Princess Alice Mansion House Fund was duly expanded to include mining disaster relief.
Notes
1. A German military spiked helmet.
2. The Times, 10 September 1878.
3. Ibid.
4. Standard, 10 September 1878.
5. The Times, 9 September 1878.
6. The Times, 10 September 1878.
7. The Times, 10 September 1878 and Coroners’ Records COR/PA.
8. Standard, 10 September 1878.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. The Times, 10 September 1878.
CHAPTER NINE
Laid to Rest
Unlike most women onboard the Princess Alice, 20-year-old Miss Ella Hanbury could swim. Indeed, she came from America where, according to the Islington Gazette of 18 September 1878, ‘encouragement is given to the practice of swimming by women’. She was not only an excellent swimmer but had ‘carried off prizes for her skill in the art’. She was also a young woman ‘of great personal attractions’, very accomplished, able to speak four languages fluently and a talented musician. Ella lived in Mildmay Road, Mildmay Park, north London, with her brother, who was a merchant. She had gone down the Thames on that lovely early autumn morning with two brothers, one of whom was her fiancé, 24-year-old William Harrison, ‘to whom she was deeply attached’.
After the collision, when it became obvious that the rope attaching their lifeboat to the Princess Alice could not be undone and they would be sucked down by the sinking steamer, William clasped Ella in his arms, kissed her and said, ‘Goodbye, darling, we shall meet again in heaven’. By which, one presumes he was unable to swim. The pair sank twice. Only she came up the second time, when she struck out and managed to swim and float for two hours eventually ending up 2 miles downriver near Barking, where she was picked up. She was kept at Barking for several days while she recovered, before being taken home to Mildmay Park, only to relapse on Friday 13 September, when she did indeed go to meet her fiancé in heaven.
The Islington inquest jury verdict as to cause of death was ‘congestion of the lungs and shock from immersion in the River Thames’. The grief at the loss of her fiancé, Mr Harrison, doubtless added to the shock, commented the Islington Gazette. As with Mrs Drew of Tottenham, who lost her daughters, a broken heart was deemed to be a contributing factor, as it probably was.
Bodies continued to beach on the banks up and down the river. On the day of Ella Hanbury’s inquest, thirteen days after the collision, a Poplar inquest jury gave its verdict on sixteen bodies that had been ‘found drowned off Blackwall’. Blackwall is on the north side of an acute curve in the Thames upriver from Woolwich, in the dockland area from which the Bywell Castle had begun its fateful journey. Among the sixteen ‘believed to have been passengers in the Princess Alice’, were one unidentified child, six identified women, one unidentified woman and eight men, two of them having been crushed before drowning.1
Funerals of victims taken home for burial began to take place, some with marked ceremony. The body of a 13-year-old student at a college in Highbury New Park was escorted to Highgate Cemetery by the school’s principal, two of the masters and his schoolfellows who placed white wreaths and sprays and tokens of affection on his coffin and sang the hymn, ‘A Few More Years May Roll’ over the grave, then threw in more flowers.
The bodies of the students and tutor from Queen’s College School for Young Ladies were also escorted by a large number of fellow boarders and the guardian of the two young White sisters whose parents lived in Shanghai. He had identified them, he said, by means of the absence of an ear lobe on one girl and the markings on their linen that he himself had made.
Two young temperance brothers were given a fervent send off with a rousing rendition of ‘Rock of Ages’, sung by large numbers of the East London Temperance Association and the Good Templars who regretted that these pure young men had been called away in the midst of careers of usefulness.
But possibly the most impressive of the funerals was that of Constable Briscoe of ‘N’ Division and his family. The cortege, formed outside his police station at Dalston, was headed by the divisional superintendent, nine inspectors, twenty-four sergeants, and over 300 constables plus ‘H’ Division’s Police Band who played the ‘Dead March’. At Briscoe’s home, these were joined by the hearse, a mourning carriage and a local fire engine mounted by eight firemen and their superintendent. The Islington Gazette of 11 September 1878, estimated that there could not have been less than 8,000–10,000 present to see the burial of this local hero who, ironically, had been awarded a medal for saving a child from death by drowning. The local newspaper also revealed that one of the Briscoe children was still missing and that there was a third Briscoe offspring, ‘a boy of tender years’ who was now an orphan.
Unsurprisingly, the Islington Gazette gave wide coverage to the fate of the Bible class from the Cowcross Mission although, like others, got a bit confused about the numbers which ranged from thirty, plus the two benevolent ladies and a few children, to a total of forty-eight. They quoted the City Press2 who made the telling point that in no part of the metropolis had so much bereavement been concentrated within as small an area as in the crowded courts and alleys adjoining the Mission Station. ‘In places like Faulkner’s-alley and Whitehorse-alley, every other house is literally a house of mourning, for one or more members of the family have perished.’
The Islington Gazette, however, got a little confused in its coverage, doubtless overwhelmed by the size of the event. When reporting on 13 September of a ‘sorrowful meeting’ of friends and neighbours of two of the latest members’ bodies to be found (Mrs Matilda Gullifer, aged fifty-six, of 12 White Horse Alley and Mrs Caroline Smith, of 12 Benjamin Street) they stated that the only surviving member of the thirty-two strong party was Mrs Brent, of 7 Faulkner’s Alley, ‘who could not go on the trip, having to take a sick child to the hospital’. In fact, Mrs Mary Brent had gone on the trip and, what’s more, had claimed in the Islington Gazette four days earlier that her survival was largely due to the fact that she was wearing her alpaca dress and petticoat which had kept her afloat.
Three more Bible class party members had survived: Jane Green, who had been a servant to 60-year-old Miss Barden, who was lost, and two children of Mrs Eliza Haist, who had gone around announcing ‘Today’s the day!’ Eliza herself and her three other children died.
Later, that day an exceedingly well attended service was held at the Cowcross Mission Hall where a list of those lost was read out and an outline of their conversion to Christ delivered by Mr Catlin, the superintendent.
For his address to the Tufnell Park Congregational Church the Reverend E.H. Palmer chose Ecclesiastes 9, 12 as his text. He, too, drew the lesson that we should listen to the warning voice of this lamentable occurrence which demonstrated that you never knew when your time would come.
‘Up to the time of the catastrophe everything went well with us,’ say the survivors. Such is generally the case, everything may seem to be going well with us, but by a flaming house, a railway collision, a runaway horse, a flash of lightning, or a thousand other causes we may be swiftly swept into the spirit world.
We should be prepared, he went on, by striving for a spiritual life. Then he overdid it somewhat by going on about the drowning, ‘struggling in the cold river, crying piteously, with wild despairing eyes for help which came not!’ He concluded his extremely long sermon with a verse:
They are out of a life of commotion,
Tempest-swept, oft as the ocean,
Dark with wrecks drifting o’er,
Into a land calm and quiet;
Never a storm cometh nigh it,
Never a wreck on its shore.3
The Reverend Styleman Herring, Vicar of St Paul’s, Clerkenwell, had already sent back a dispatch from the
front to the Islington Gazette, having gone down to the scene early on to seek ‘a valued missionary’ whom he had heard was lost. ‘The corpses,’ he reported back were, ‘mostly women of a respectable class’. He described how he had looked after, then sent home, a widowed parishioner who was mourning over the loss of an aged sister who, with two ladies and thirty mothers from a Quakers’ meeting, had gone for an excursion, and alas, not returned. ‘No one’, he said ‘but the stoutest hearts ought to see these rows of mangled, swollen and distorted corpses – each seemed convulsively grasping something’.4
For his text before the congregation at St John’s, Clerkenwell, the Reverend W. Dawson took chapters 19 and 20 of the Gospel of St Matthew, from which he drew the message that in the midst of life we are in death and that, even in that hour of terror, darkness and despair, God was present and saw what passed. The offertory, he concluded, would be sent to the Mansion House Relief Fund.
The Mansion House Relief Fund was the Lord Mayor of the City of London’s fund for the relief of those who had suffered from the disaster. To fill its coffers, theatres and music halls held special fundraising performances. Collection boxes, placed at hotels and outside the Mansion House, were constantly filled. The National Sunday League and ‘S’ Division Police Band joined forces to give a concert in Regent’s Park and a north/south cricket match took place for the aid of the combined Princess Alice and Welsh Colliery Disaster funds. The teams included many well-known cricketers, including W. G. Grace, and the Australian cricket team, before leaving for home after a ‘sensational’ four-month season countrywide, donated £100.
Members of the Stock Exchange gave over £1,000, the traders at Smithfield Meat Market £172.2s and 400 francs came from workmen in a Parisian pottery who had not forgotten that London sent bread to a famished Paris in 1871. For the same reason, the Comédie Français in Paris, ‘preserving an appreciative recollection of the good help which was rendered to them in 1871’, sent a cheque for £50.5